


Loyalty

by Dame_Lazarus



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mafia/Paramilitary, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, Soul-Crushing Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:20:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23865910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dame_Lazarus/pseuds/Dame_Lazarus
Summary: You don’t cross the Starks.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 28
Kudos: 62





	Loyalty

**Author's Note:**

> This fic brought to you by: the modern LSH headspace that won’t fade, rainy days, and a cops & criminals AU prompt fill that ddagent posted on Tumblr. (The prompt is at the end after the jump.)

You don’t cross the Starks.

Jaime Lannister knew for certain that this saying was not an exaggeration when they grabbed him off the street one misty night and pulled him into a windowless black van. It was the oldest son, Robb, who did the deed, yanking him back by his shoulders so hard that he thought his arms might pop out of the sockets. He had to at least respect him for handling it himself.

He didn’t see the attack coming. He should have. Three weeks before, his father had sent several armed men down to the bar the Stark family patriarch Ned owned just before closing. Just for a conversation, he said, though Jaime doubted such a thing normally required multiple guns.

The result was a disaster: two dead bartenders behind the row of taps and Ned Stark’s brains splattered on the front steps. Ned’s two young daughters were there too, helping to wipe down the tables, but Lannisters didn’t leave girls’ corpses laying around for all to see. The gunmen whisked the two remaining witnesses away in a car and no one had heard from them since. Not even Jaime.

That’s what he told Robb Stark and his men in the back of the van that day. They tied his hands and then punched him in the face. They kicked him in the ribs. That didn’t make him remember information that he didn’t know, so then they put a pillowcase over his head and dragged him from the car down into a damp cellar. Someone pushed him to sit on a cold dirt floor. When they pulled the pillowcase off, all he could see was a single lightbulb hanging overhead and the drawn, angry face of Ned Stark’s wife in front of him.

“Where are my daughters, Jaime?” Catelyn had been vivacious and charming, when they were in school and all this family feud shit was a light breeze in the background. Now she was pale and thin and tired.

“I swear to you that I do not know. I’m the layabout son with no concern for the family legacy. My father doesn’t exactly include me in the privileged briefings on their hostage activities.”

She slapped him.

“Look,” he said, still reeling. “I mean it. I don’t like how this was handled, and my father knows it. They haven’t said a word of it to me since.” If you’re going to murder a woman’s barely teenage children, or hold them hostage, you at least have the decency to let her know. The Lannisters already made her a widow. More cruelty wasn’t necessary.

Catelyn Stark moved closer. “Could you make them talk?”

Someone clicked a gun in the darkness behind her. Jaime swallowed. “I can try.”

“You had better do more than try,” Catelyn hissed.

“I will,” he said. “I swear it.”

She stood and looked over her shoulder. Perhaps at the gunman, wherever he was.

“Brienne here will keep an eye on you,” she said. It was an odd name for the man that loomed into the light then, tall and broad and wearing an impossibly serious look on his face. “You’ll report to her.”

Her. The eyes gave it away, he supposed: long, pretty, pale lashes, the sole dainty feature in that square, grim face, fluttering over startlingly blue eyes. The light in them was fierce and determined.

“Are you sure that’s a woman?” he asked. Brienne glared at him but didn’t flinch.

“Lose the attitude or she’ll kick your ass.” As if to prove her point, Brienne lunged forward and dragged him roughly to his feet.

“Time for a ride,” she said.

He had resisted, then. The whole way out of that cellar and up to the road, he’d squirmed and tried to shout. She clamped a hand firmly over his mouth through the dark pillowcase and pushed him violently into the passenger seat of a car, not even bothering to duck his head. The crack of the back of his head on the doorframe left a massive lump there for days.

This time, though, things are different. She holds the passenger door open for him and just asks him to get in. He bends and sits down without a world. The blue light of the early morning matches her eyes. They aren’t defiant; today, they are just sad.

* * *

  
It’s not a nice day. The sun rises through a film of gray. Rain pelts the windshield and sprays out from tires as they hum along down empty back roads. 

“Never been down this scenic of a route before,” he remarks, staring at the muted green fields that span either side of them. “I half expect to see a grumpkin run out in front of us.” He’s only joking; he knows it’s the only way they could go.

She purses her lips and doesn’t say anything.

“We could probably have some spectacularly rowdy fun on the side of one of these roads,” he continues. “Very little chance of interruption. If you know what I mean.”

She sighs and keeps her eyes straight on the road. The car picks up speed.

“You used to laugh at my jokes,” he says, though she rarely had, in reality, no matter how much he’d wished she would.

“Stop. Please.” Her voice is quavering. She’s gripping the steering wheel so tight that her knuckles turn white. “I can’t. There’s this really hard thing I’ve got to do.”

He knows that just as well. This is a punishment for her, too. A test. You don’t cross the Starks.

* * *

The night they met, she dumped him out in the middle of the street just on the border of the Lannister part of town.

“The Mews at half past eight,” she’d hissed in his ear as she untied him. “If you don’t show up, your next ride with us won’t have a happy ending.”

As if staggering around with a bashed-in face to his father’s house in the middle of the night was something to be happy about. The drop-off spot was close enough that he decided he’d just try to get it over with. A stupid plan. He was always full of those.

It wasn’t his father that answered the door. It was his sister, wide awake and dressed, with black makeup still lining her eyes.

“You look like shit,” Cersei said, pulling the door back so he could enter. “Don’t go downstairs. Father won’t be pleased to see you.”

So Jaime sat on the couch instead, his half-assed plan evaporating as his sister dashed back down into the basement. _Nice to see you too, sweet sister_ , he thought. _Me? I’m fine. Thank you so much for asking._

When his father did come upstairs, he indeed wasn’t pleased to see Jaime. Three men, two old, one young, all suspicious, trailed behind him. Jaime didn’t recognize any of them and he knew everyone in town who was on their side.

“What’s happened to you?” his father asked.

_Just a little light kidnapping and death threats between friends—don’t worry._

“Bar fight,” he replied instead.

His father shook his head and led his new friends out the door. None of them looked back.

The next day, he went to the Mews after dark like Brienne ordered. There were a lot of little rows of buildings like this in town, former stables around a ramshackle courtyard now serving as a very poor imitation of a parking lot. But he knew the ones she meant: the ones on the edge of town, more suited to warehouses than apartments. They lined the unofficial border between her people’s territory and his. The border between Stark and Lannister.

He saw Brienne’s hulking shadow between two buildings halfway down the row. She turned at the sound of his footsteps.

“So?” she asked, arms crossed over her chest.

“So? I can hardly just walk up to my father and ask if he could finally spill where he’s hiding the Stark girls.”

“You didn’t even try, did you?” She pulled out her handgun from her jacket pocket.

“Listen, I’ll hold up my end of this bargain. I just need more time. You can tell your lady I’m working on it.”

The gun was pointed at his face. No change in her expression.

“Fine. Tell her this: my father had three strange guests late last night, plotting something in the basement with my sister. Out of towners, most likely.” It wasn’t what she asked for, but he thought it might tide her over.

She lowered the gun. Nodded. They were getting somewhere.

“Friday. Here.”

“Deal,” he replied.

The next day Jaime stopped by his father’s place again. The man raised his eyebrows skeptically when he told him he’s feeling left out, but Jaime knew he’d secretly been waiting for this moment for years. It was the first time he’d asked to do something for the family, rather than being told and complaining all the way.

Growing up, it was always the forgone conclusion that Jaime would take over running the properties and the construction business and all the under the table stuff, too. Jaime hated the thought. He didn’t want to run anything. He left school early and took a job bagging groceries out of spite. His father still held out hope, though—paying his bills, updating him on the company’s finances at family gatherings, as if he cared.

He also never deigned to groom either of his other two siblings to take over. The job was for Jaime, when he came to his senses. They both seethed. His younger brother put an ocean between them in his rage. His twin sister put more and more guns over her shoulder until she was weighed down, sinking, dreaming only of bloodshed, and still that wasn’t enough for their father.

“I’m glad to see you’ve come to your senses,” his father said, gruffly. He promptly sent Jaime down to the top secret basement; the three strange men were down there, smoking, drinking, and cleaning bullets. His sister was nowhere to be found.

They did, as he expected, come from out of town. The old wrinkled man, Walder Frey, was the head a syndicate from the Riverlands. He didn’t say much, but he laughed at Jaime’s jokes, a little grunting laugh, the corner of his mouth turning up in a grizzled half-smile. The other two, father and son, the Boltons, came from further up North. Roose, the father, was pale and sour-faced, saying next to nothing; the son, a wild-eyed bundle of nervous energy, fond of spinning unloaded guns around on his fingers as he prattled on. One of these days he was going to do that with a gun that wasn’t unloaded, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

They were too important to be hanging around here, assembling weapons. They were waiting for something.

“Some fucker comes at me again on the way out to Harrenhal,” the younger Bolton, Ramsey, said, “I’m blowing him to pieces.” He aimed his gun at the wall behind him and mimed pulling the trigger.

“What’s at Harrenhal?” Jaime tried not to sound too curious.

Old Walder’s face had twisted into a grin once more. “Special cargo. Real special.”

Jaime kept his word: a week later, same time, same place, he stood in the dark old Mews, waiting for Brienne. They huddled close along a wall, shielding themselves from a biting wind full of rain.

“It’s this old dump of a mansion that my cousin owns,” he had explained. “He wanted the land, originally. The house itself is a strong wind away from falling in on itself.”

Brienne’s face was serious, at last. She believed him. “And you think the Stark girls are there?”

He shrugged. “It’s worth a look.”

As they were parting, she tilted her head at him, pursed her lips. “Your face looks better, by the way. What did your family say about it?”

He had laughed. “Nothing, really. They just told me I looked like shit.”

Less than a week later, his sister pushed a cold, hard gun into those same healing bruises. They were standing in the kitchen of his father’s house, and it was the quiet hours of the afternoon, when people were at work or taking care of normal life things like laundry or groceries. She thrust him up against the wall, her green eyes narrow, little knives cutting into his, death in her hand. Normal life things, for this family.

“A bunch of Stark men just ransacked Harrenhal and stole a huge stockpile of guns,” she said. “The Bolton kid said you asked about it. You’re asking too many questions. Why are you asking all these questions?”

Her face hovered just inches from his, her blond hair brushing his cheek. He laughed and the puff of air from his mouth sent the strands aflutter. Still the cold metal of her gun kissed his cheek. “You fancying yourself the enforcer these days, Cersei?”

“Someone has to step up in this family, with the two of you fucking off and being selfish brats,” she snapped.

“I don’t know anything about what happened at Harrenhal,” he said, finally, and she pulled herself and her gun back. Her face didn’t reveal any belief or satisfaction. She just had wanted him to know where he stood with her. Tyrion was the smart one; he got the hell out of this family.

He went to the Mews again that Friday. He told himself it was because he had to go, because they said they’d kill him if he didn’t show. But that wasn’t it, really.

“Did they find them?” he asked her. She shook her head, casting her blue, blue eyes to the ground. 

“Pity about all that ammo, though,” Brienne said, with a bit of a smug look on her face. He had to suppress a grin. He didn’t think she had it in her to gloat. She usually was so serious.

“My sister shoved a gun in my face,” he said, out of nowhere. She snapped her eyes to meet his. “She suspects, but she’s always suspicious. She doesn’t really know.”

”You should watch your back.”

“You should be watching _your_ back. They know it was the Starks. It will be how it always is: one attack to pay for one slight, and then a fresh counterattack to pay for that one, over and over and over, until what you’re fighting over isn’t even the same thing that set this whole thing in motion.” He sighs. It’s a treadmill, a hamster wheel spinning out of control. He just wants to get off.

She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t take her gun out either.

“I’m sorry I didn’t find out where girls are,” he had said, to fill the silence. “I’ll keep trying.”

* * *

At last she slows down. Alongside an overgrown field, she pulls the car over on the side of the road.

“Here?” he asks. She shakes her head. It won’t be her. He is half grateful and half sad about that.

She looks down at his little overnight bag, shoved haphazardly at his feet.

“I never thought I was going to end up using it, at least not for long,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “We can still—“

They can’t. It might work for a time, but eventually someone would come for them. Stark men. Lannister men. Maybe both. Their treachery could be the thing that brings the warring families together, at last.

He takes her face in his hands and kisses her. It’s a sweet kiss, a kiss meant to comfort. He presses his lips to hers like it’s an old habit and not one developed in the last twenty-four hours. Her hand wraps around his wrist, delicate in that unexpected way of hers.

“No,” he tells her, pulling away. “I already have deaths on my hands. I won’t have yours, too.”

* * *

He had wished he hadn’t been so right, about what came next. Bloodshed, in retaliation for destroying the means of it. 

His father and sister looked ecstatic when they told him. People called their family lions, and the Starks wolves, but on that day, Tywin and Cersei’s gleeful toothy grins were positively canine. Eight gunmen, plus their two strange friends from up North, covered their faces with black scarves and barged into a Stark family wedding.

The groom was Catelyn’s younger brother. He spent all of two hours as a married man, before one of Jaime’s father’s men put a bullet in his head. Robb Stark and his pregnant wife were there, too. It was said that the man’s mother sobbed as she watched her son and his family collapse to the floor in pools of their own blood. Twenty-odd guests, all dead in assorted terrible ways.

There was one thing that took the smirks off his family’s faces: Catelyn survived. She was laid up in the hospital, in critical condition, but she still lived.

Jaime didn’t dare ask about Brienne. His sister would do more than just press a gun to his face if he started asking after the well-being of minor Stark loyalists.

When he got home, he called the morgue. He was looking for a young woman who didn’t come home: a tall, terrifying blond, named Brienne Tarth. _No one of that name here, sir_ , they told him. He called the hospital, too. _No one of that name here, sir._

Finally, he looked up her address online. It took hours of googling; his eyes felt glassy and the sun had set behind him before he tracked her down. No one answered when he knocked on her sad rental house door. _Maybe this was the wrong address_ , he had thought, but he sat down on the cracked cement of the front stoop to wait until someone came back. He couldn’t move until he knew for sure.

Her car rattled up to the driveway eventually. The house light was broken and so he had sat there in the dark, not moving. She stopped halfway up the steps, looking down at him just a short distance away. He wished it was lighter so he could make out the blue of her eyes. It was so rare that she’d look straight at him like that.

“I just wanted to make sure everything was ok,” he said.

“It’s not,” she replied, “but Catelyn is going to make it.”

“I didn’t know about this, Brienne.”

She nodded. “You should go.” He had walked there, but he just stood and nodded back, and walked himself home again.   
  


He wasn’t sure how they found out about him, but it was soon after. Maybe someone saw him at Brienne’s. Maybe it was the hospital call. Using the phone had been stupid. Maybe his family had their own spy.

Someone sent him two hands, each from a different body. Two small hands in a white pastry box. Pretty hands. Young girls’ hands. One wore a silver wolf ring. No mistaking what that emblem stood for.

He went to Brienne straight away with a hastily packed bag. He left the hands in his bathtub. He hadn’t known what else to do with them.

“I’ve been blown,” he said. “They sent me the girls’ hands.”

Her face briefly crumpled and she had to put her hand on the side of the door frame to steady herself. But she let him in. Where else could he go?

They sat on her couch, curtains pulled tight. She poured them each a glass of whiskey; he had only ever pretended to like the stuff, because it was a thing men were supposed to like. He told her this after they finished their first glass, and got her laughing in a dark way. She poured them a second.

He wasn’t sure when the night turned. Somewhere between the third and fourth rounds. She had been slumped over, her head in her hands, and then she said, morosely, that it was all her fault.

He pulled her up and held her there, so they were eye to eye. “This isn’t your fault. It’s my crazy family’s fault. One child for another. It’s how we think.”

“It’s not how you think,” she said. “You could have brought one of those henchmen to the Mews with you, but you never did. You do the right thing. You keep your word.”

He could hardly say that was true. He promised loads of things he never followed through on. Unreliable, his sister called him. Useless.

“It hardly matters now,” he said. “Someone is going to want me dead for this. Good intentions or not.”

Her face had moved close to his, somewhere in the conversation. The room felt hazy. He pressed his forehead to hers. She took in a deep breath, and then they were kissing, sloppy and wet-faced.

 _One month_ , he thought, as they stumbled to the bedroom. One month, from cursing her stupid face as she pushed him onto a sidewalk with a lump on his head and drove away, to falling into bed with her, putting his life in danger to check up on her. It had crept up on them, whatever this was, but it was all he had.

She got a phone call late in the night. When she laid back down in the bed, he turned to face her.

“They sent Catelyn their heads,” she whispered. It was his turn to close his eyes and steady himself.

“I’ll speak to her,” she said. “I’ll explain that you had no part in this.”

He nodded, though he doubted she’d get very far with that. He reached for her then, selfish to the end. She put her arms around him easily, stroked her hands through his hair. At least he’d go to his death having had one last bit of affection from someone.

At morning light, he woke to see her sitting in a chair, staring at him. He caught her eye; the look there was not one of longing. “Get up,” she said, “and get your things. We need—I need to take you somewhere.”

* * *

  
She sees something through the mist up ahead and stiffens. It’s faint: a glow of lights. He can hear the tires move along the worn pavement. They will stop their car soon, too, these expected guests. 

He reaches down into his bag and pulls out a thick envelope. He’s had it ready since all this bullshit began: ten thousand dollars in cash, in case he needed to run. Only it wouldn’t be him doing the running, after all.

On the outside, he writes down Tyrion’s number, and places it on Brienne’s lap.

“Go buy a ticket to Pentos and then call him when you land. Get yourself out of this. The wheel is going to keep spinning and spinning; nothing will ever change.”

She slides the envelope under her seat. Good girl, he thinks. He’ll at least go to his death knowing she’ll be safe.

He kisses her again, not as nicely as the last time. This is a kiss for comfort, too, though—for him. “Take care of yourself, Brienne,” he says softly against her ear.

“You too,” she says, wiping her face. He wants to laugh at that. But he won’t have the last memory of him be mistaken for mockery, so he holds it back.

He opens the car door and steps out onto the road, his bag at his side. He looks back once more at her, rain tumbling down the windshield over her stoic face.

He turns then and walks towards his fate. There was only one way this could ever end. He accepts it. You don’t cross the Starks.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: _My boss ordered me to drive you to the desert and kill you there, but you have no idea and keep talking about our future, please stop, I can’t take it._
> 
> In his book _Say Nothing_ , Patrick Radden Keefe recounts how IRA member Dolours Price, tasked with couriering traitors so they could be taken across the border to Ireland be disappeared, felt great remorse for having to drive her friend Joe Lynskey to his execution. “I just have this very difficult thing to do,” she allegedly told him as he tried to make small talk, despite knowing exactly where they were going.


End file.
